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Here, and not here

So today I logged into WordPress in definitely more than a year (probably more like three), to have a message announcing to me one very interesting thing:

Today is the 10th anniversary of my signing up for WordPress.com with this email. Who knew?

I mean, I’ve been on WordPress for longer than that, I think. But as a medium for my life and writing, it’s been largely abandoned for some time. It’s in good company: I’ve likewise left Blogger, LiveJournal, DreamWidth, Twitter, and a host (ha) of other services, some of which don’t exist anymore. I’ve spent roughly the last 20 years trying to organize and/or express myself online — since the days of GeoCities, in fact. Pre-Yahoo! GeoCities.

I’m no more organized about this now than I ever was; I’ve drifted back to Tumblr in the past year, creating yet another account, theoretically devoted to fanfiction writing…but of course, it’s now become an amalgam of fandom, feminism, and whatever other random things catch my interest.

Why is it that, every time I present myself online, I feel compelled to compartmentalize everything, splintering my interests until they’re littering the interwebs? And then, when I’ve tired of trying to find every bit of it, I create another page just to try and contain all the pieces? I have lost count of all the iterations of myself, and lost track of all the places I left them.

A lot of this mania has been fueled by the Next New Thing – coming to WP after Blogger, Twitter after Facebook, Tumblr after that. I’ve slowed down, neglected to automatically adopt WhatsApp and Snapchat, leaving those for other (younger) people with more time and, honestly, emotional energy.

If nothing else, I suppose that onset of inertia will bring the fracturing of my online presence to a halt, at least eventually.